Applications:

NIMROD GOES INTERNATIONAL

A recent round of discussions between key international research centers and the Australian Cooperative Research center for Enterprise Distributed Systems (DSTC) at Monash University will see the Nimrod/G Grid tool set deployed at a number of key sites around the globe over coming months. The discussions have focused around creating a small of sites that act as a first port of call for Nimrod users in the region. These Nimrod centers will provide access to the Nimrod family of tools via a web enabled portal. Thus, while the control and management of Nimrod jobs is centralized, the computational resources can be located anywhere.

The Nimrod (www.csse.monash.edu.au/~davida/nimrod) family of tools provide mechanisms for constructing and executing large parameter sweep and search applications. The fundamental principle is that a user can supply an arbitrary unmodified application, and Nimrod can use this as the heart of a parameter sweep or search. Nimrod can help answer questions like: "What happens to simulation output when I change these input values?" or more complex questions like, "How do I minimize the binding energy between these two molecules?" It can execute jobs on a range of platforms from workstations farms, to clusters and Grid-enabled resources. For wide area Grid deployment, it leverages the Globus toolkit, the world leader in middleware for computational and data Grids. Over the years Nimrod has been applied to problems ranging from ecology to physics, from public health policy to quantum chemistry.

While Nimrod/G has been freely available, and has been downloaded over 1000 times since the beginning of 2002, these new installations will differ by providing a Nimrod point-of-presence for more than one user.

In North America, Nimrod is being installed at the San Diego Supercomputing Center, and underpins applications in areas of quantum chemistry and bio-engineering. SDSC is an organized research unit of the University of California-San Diego. It is an international leader in data management, biosciences, geosciences, Grid computing and visualization. This particular installation is also used to service Nimrod applications mounted through the Pacific Rim Applications Grid Middleware Assembly. In South America, Nimrod will be installed at the National Laboratory of Scientific Computing, one of Brazil's top research laboratories. Based in Petropolis, Brazil, it promotes and performs research and development in the diverse fields of scientific computation, with emphasis in the creation of mathematical and computational application models. Nimrod will be applied there to a range of computations from blood flow to environmental issues. In the UK, Nimrod and the portal will be installed at the Welsh e-Science center in Cardiff. The WeSC is hosted by the Cardiff School of Computer Science at Cardiff University, was established as part of the U.K. national e-Science initiative, and has received additional funding from the Welsh Development Agency, and Cardiff University. The Nimrod portal at the WeSC will underpin a number of applications at the other U.K. centers, including a novel cancer treatment application in Cardiff.

In Australia, the Nimrod portal will be installed at a number of sites from the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing, including VPAC in Melbourne and QPSF in Brisbane.

Professor David Abramson from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, lead CI of the Nimrod project since it began in 1994, said, "This is a wonderful opportunity to Grid enable legacy science and engineering codes. I'm excited about some of the new applications that are coming on line."